FLO TV

We've been more than a little dismissive of Qualcomm's FLO TV Personal Television, with SlashGear columnist Michael Gartenberg summing up most of our doubts when he asked why you'd want to carry a separate, dedicated device. Now, thanks to a deal with mophie, the FLO TV prospect has just got a whole lot more interesting: iPod touch and iPhone juice pack sleeves that add not only a backup battery but FLO TV live television receiving on the Apple handhelds.

In a world that's short on all sorts of resources from oil and gas to water, recently we've been asked to cut down our use yet more. Last week, Ralph de la Vega said heavy users of music over data on the AT&T wireless network were bandwidth hogs, that 3% of smartphone users were using 40% of his capacity and frankly, we need to all cut back just a bit. Spectrum is among the few things that they're not making any more of and, with more users than ever, it's going to be hard to come up with the capacity needed to keep everyone happy. One solution to this is to shift some of the capacity off of current networks and come up with new broadcast models for content distribution. The folks at FloTV have done just that. The service has been around for a bit, mostly on handsets from AT&T that carry support for the service. In a reverse trend the FloTV folks have gone from the phone to creating a dedicated device for the service.

Having seen its packaging making the rounds, it was only a matter of time until Qualcomm made their FLO TV Personal Television official. The palm-sized touchscreen mediaplayer has a 3.5-inch display and is 0.5-inches thick; FLO TV offers wireless live and time-shifted TV that up until now you'd have needed to have a compatible smartphone from Verizon or other carriers in order to view. Unfortunately, the monthly subscription fee those carriers levied is still in place: as well as the $249.99 of the FLO TV device itself, you're looking at the equivalent of $8.99 or more for each month.

Yes, it's just a box, and yes, we realise someone - some very dull, poorly-occupied person - could have knocked it up themselves and be laughing at us from behind their camera, but we'll take the simple route and say this is the first sighting of Qualcomm's FLO TV Personal TV packaging. The upcoming device is tipped to be Qualcomm's attempt to drive adoption of their terrestrial digital TV service, a compact touchscreen slate with integrated speakers.

It's not the biggest photo, nor the clearest, but since it shows Qualcomm's FLO TV personal TV mediaplayer in the wild we'll make do. Initially tipped back in August, the FLO TV PTV handheld is Qualcomm's attempt to push their terrestrial digital TV service which is streamed over a separate chunk of the spectrum in the US.

Any parent will tell you that the key to surviving trips of any length in the car with kids is a TV inside the car. Without a TV, a long road trip would be hellish with my kids. The other issue when you have a TV inside on long trips is that the kids get tired of watching the same old movies after a while. Audiovox and FLO TV have announced that their live TV system for vehicles is making its way to new car dealers around the country.